Josh O’Connor

As the insured party’s occupation is a core consideration when calculating premiums, the man behind the counter at the brokerage – having been lurking under the proverbial rock for a few years – asked what Josh did for a living.

“I said, ‘I’m an actor,’” he recalls, eyes darting as we acclimatise to the cosy gloom of a restaurant in Clerkenwell, London, after a leisurely springtime stroll. “And it was the weirdest conversation because…he was, like, ‘What level of actor are you?’ and I thought, well there’s no way I could answer that without sounding like a complete prick.”
Josh tried to reverse his way out of the awkwardness using humour.

“I said, ‘Well, I think I’m brilliant, obviously.’”

The insurance man was unmoved. “He was, like, ‘What have you been in?’ So I said, ‘Well, not much. I haven’t been around very long, see.’ And he…well, he had to type me in to Google, and then he issued me an insurance policy based on how likely I am to drive bigger stars around – like, in case I ever have to run Robert De Niro down to the shops or something. Because if I drive Robert De Niro down to the shops and I crash, the insurance payout’s going to be huge.” Josh’s premiums came in accordingly large. “It’s mad.”

In contemplating all of this, 6-foot-2 Josh, who today is wearing a navy-blue track top, blue jeans and a pair of desert boots and eating haddock from the set lunch menu, has momentarily covered his face with his hands, which are enormous and well-upholstered with pale flesh. They probably constitute two of the reasons Josh’s first ever film role was playing a goalkeeper, in ‘The Magnificent Eleven’, Irvine Welsh’s working-class caper about a failing Sunday league football team which, inevitably for a certain kind of British comedy, sees everyone losing their clothes before the end of the trailer.

I glance at Josh’s ears, which were an important factor in his being cast in his most high-profile role to date, playing the young Charles, Prince of Wales in season three of Netflix’s ‘The Crown’, aka the world’s poshest soap opera. By fluke of birth, Josh’s ears are exactly the right shape, if somewhat smaller than I’d expect a twenty-something Prince Charles’s to be. Arts critic Nancy Durrant of ‘The Times’ perceptively described them as “sort of swivelled forwards, as if anticipating something of great interest.”

In assuming the guise of the heir apparent to the British throne, Josh seizes the baton from 11-year-old Billy Jenkins, who portrayed Charles during his unhappy career at the austere Scottish boarding school Gordonstoun. In the new season, out in autumn, we’ll meet Charles as he becomes the first heir to the throne to achieve a university degree, reading archaeology and anthropology at the University of Cambridge. “He’s spreading his wings,” says Josh.

Charles’s engagement to Lady Diana Spencer is still a distant prospect, but a young Camilla Shand – played by Emerald Fennell, who has described the future Duchess of Cornwall as “a chain-smoking serial snogger with a pudding-bowl haircut” – is not, as evidenced by early publicity stills that recreate the moment of the pair’s first meeting, after a polo match in 1970.

Josh’s mother, a retired midwife called Emily, is on the same page. “My mum keeps saying, ‘He doesn’t look anything like Charles. What are you saying? You haven’t got big ears. He’s got normal ears!’ Suddenly the protective mum comes out.”

In such conversations, Josh is liable to leap to Charles’s defence (“I’m, like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I think he was so handsome and girls were obsessed with him; he was the most eligible bachelor”), but he will admit to having drawn inspiration from one of the less devastating members of the animal kingdom in order to interpret Charles’s body language, namely the tortoise.

“It’s less about walking, more about other things that he does,” says Josh. “I worked with a great movement director called Polly Bennett, and she has this thing where she talks about an animal – she tries to find the character’s inner spirit animal, I guess.”

While demonstrating Charles’s habit (“which Philip also has”) of retracting his head into his neck, Josh immediately starts to sound like Matt Smith, the actor who has hitherto played Prince Philip in ‘The Crown’. “It immediately affects the voice,” says Josh. “In my mind, I’ve made the decision that it’s all to do with safety,” says Josh on the subject of Charles in motion, “because it sort of protects the body and some of the key organs. Making those decisions before you start in a role is really important because you have to be consistent, but it’s also the funnest bit as well. It’s definitely the best bit. I loved walking around like him and talking like him.”

After excelling in the BBC’s big new year, non-musical adaptation of ‘Les Misérables’, Josh has been earning plaudits for his role as Jake in ‘Only You’, a drama in which an age-gap couple endure successive rounds of in vitro fertilisation in Glasgow. Four days after our meeting, Olivia Colman, who plays Josh’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II, in ‘The Crown’, will supplement her Golden Globe and BAFTA wins for her role in ‘The Favourite’ with an Oscar. And a few months ago, Josh finished a stint shooting in Yorkshire with Annette Bening and Bill Nighy, his parents in the upcoming film ‘Hope Gap’, an independent drama tracking the lives of three members of a family as it unexpectedly falls apart. Filming it was lovely, Josh says.

“They were such brilliant co-stars,” he says of Bening and Nighy. I resist the urge to ask whether Josh ran either of them to the supermarket. In any case, he volunteers something more interesting.

“I met up with Francis,” he says, referring to Francis Lee, the extravagantly-bearded and notoriously secluded actor-turned-director and screenwriter whose debut feature-length film was 2017’s exquisite ‘God’s Own Country’.

“It’s a little in-joke we have,” says Josh when I bring this up. “Basically, I do think he’s an auteur, but I once said old turd when we were taking the piss out of each other and it stuck. You did well to recognise that!”

Having myself grown up in the exact area the film depicts, it’s hard for me to overstate the impressive specificity of Josh’s accent work on ‘God’s Own Country’ – more so now I’ve witnessed his own West Country burr in real life. Even in his grunting inarticulacy at the beginning of the film, Josh’s Johnny is identifiably from Keighley (where Francis Lee continues to live) as opposed to, say, Bingley or even Baildon, which are respectively five and nine miles further along the Worth Valley.

Accordingly, when Lee first received Josh’s audition tape for ‘God’s Own Country’ he immediately assumed that Josh – a self-described “posh boy” from the sunlit uplands of the southwest of England – was from the same bleak but beautiful environs as his protagonist. As Josh would go on to tell ‘Gay Times’, Francis “saw the tape and was, like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve found someone from Keighley and he’s great for it. The only problem is he looks really troubled and might be a bit problematic.’”

Josh embraced method acting for ‘God’s Own Country’ and went to live and work on a Yorkshire sheep farm for three weeks prior to filming. During that time, he became indispensable to the actual farmer, John. “I’d be doing a scene, they’d yell cut and then John would come and get me, and I’d help deliver a lamb,” Josh has said. “I wasn’t in a trailer with my feet up; I was going to the farm and sticking my hand up a cow’s arse.” Farmer John’s characteristically faint but sincere praise for ‘God’s Own Country’ (“that was all right, that”) was the most important critique of all, says Josh.

Listening to Josh recount the details of his midsummer meet-up with Francis, it’s clear the feelings are ardently reciprocated. “I picked him up in my new Golf and we drove up to my grandfather’s chapel that he built over the years – and it was amazing because I’ve grown up with that chapel and going there with Francis was such an overwhelming, emotional thing for me, really – and going there as an adult without my family, too. It was honestly one of the most beautiful days ever. Perfect.”

“He does look quite a lot like me, I think, as I’m getting older,” says Josh.

Bunting and his wife, the ceramicist Romola Farquharson, separated in 1978 after having two sons and three daughters, one of whom is Josh’s mother, Emily (Josh’s father, John, is a retired English teacher whose side of the family is “very secure and calming, and routined” and so “a complete contrast” to that of his mother).

Josh suspects this dextrous legacy is why preparation for so many of his roles begins with his character’s hands. Take the future King Charles III. “Charles’s hands are fascinating because he rarely uses them, and actually his gestures have reduced significantly since his twenties,” says Josh. “There’s an interview he did with David Frost just before the investiture that made him Prince of Wales, and he used his hands much more then. Nowadays he always has his hands firmly in his front pockets, fisted down. It’s as if, as he gets older, he is holding the whole nation in place. His hands are held down like guns – it’s amazing.”

Since August 2017, Josh has been uploading sketches to his Instagram feed. Peppered among stills from his film work and pictures of heroes such as Derek Jarman, these black- and blue-inked, lined drawings of female torsos and stylised faces with bulbous foreheads feature Miró-esque arrows and curlicues and have upper-case titles that reference obscure colours (‘glaucous’ and ‘aureolin’). I wonder whether Josh would like to talk about them.

“Honestly, I’m shameless. I’m, like, yes please! Let me see where they are… I can tell you a bit about some of them –” Josh calls up an Instagram post labelled ‘Salmon’, from 10 August last year, that’s comprised of a diptych of similar faces. He explains that he gave one to Bill Nighy and the other to Annette Bening. “On the back is some writing to say thank you for working with me,” says Josh, continuing to scroll through his phone. “This one I think I did for a friend. They are all sorts of people and shapes. It’s my quiet place actually… There’s a word for it, isn’t there?”
Flow. Josh says he produces the images spontaneously, without a sitter, on random bits of paper, such as till receipts, and gives away or loses so many of them that Instagram constitutes a useful digital repository.

Josh’s facility with imagery and (one imagines) his family history have proven to be creative and commercial catnip for Jonathan Anderson, the fashion designer whose revivification of the Spanish luxury leather brand Loewe has been predicated on Anderson’s own deep admiration for craft. Jonathan recruited Josh as the face of Loewe menswear after seeing him in ‘God’s Own Country’, saying at the time: “I thought that Josh’s performance had a genuine strength which feels very pure, and an organic kind of feeling which I really liked.” The association with Loewe is not Josh’s first job in fashion. At around the age of 16 he worked as a Saturday shop assistant at the ubiquitous high-street fashion chain River Island.

“Cheltenham branch, Regent Arcade,” he says, with the air of an ex-serviceman reeling off his regiment and battalion from his tour of duty. “My best mate Mike also worked there, and they would split us up to stop us from causing havoc; they made him head of accessories, which was literally one plinth with four men’s necklaces – and I was head of footwear, a bit more responsibility.”
The store had been experiencing a spate of shoplifting. “So they issued these headsets with a little mouthpiece, and if you saw a known shoplifter there was a code word, and that would alert security throughout the arcade. What me and my friend Mike discovered was that you could just tune into each other’s headsets and chat away. Shoplifting actually went up!”

As a severely dyslexic boy at a very academically rigorous school, Josh says he spent a long time feeling “there wasn’t a world of options available to me.”

He was ten or eleven when he was diagnosed. “To be honest, there’s still a part of me that is ashamed – not ashamed, but I think I see it as an excuse that gets bandied around sometimes. For years I just denied that I even had it. I had the test and… I’ve been told it’s almost certainly better than this now…but they put a picture of a dog in front of you and you go, ‘That’s a dog,’ and they go, ‘Okay, spell that,’ and you go, ‘Fuck off, are you joking?’ They had to go through all of these processes. I remember at the end they asked, ‘What do you think dyslexia is?’ and I was a 10-year-old boy, so I said, ‘Well, it means you’re stupid,’ and they said, ‘No it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean you are stupid at all. That’s an awful thing to say. It means you are intellectually challenged.’”

Josh thinks his dyslexia has benefited his acting.

“It was so awful, but I kind of embraced it,” he says. “It makes you work harder and you invest more – you have to find different ways of working. I can’t sit down and learn a script – I just can’t do that – so I have to create a character first, which equips you for pretty much any eventuality. Unless I have this memory bank of images, there is no way a word is going to come into my brain at all. I’m kind of working backwards.”

He creates an actual scrapbook in preparation for every role he plays. “The whole point of a scrapbook for me is that you’re creating a sort of sensory memory bank,” he says. Exploring the physical world is important, too. In preparation for playing Charles, he says, “I wanted to surround myself with grandeur and antiquity.”

Sadly, the exhibit Josh really wants me to see – a mummified cat that Sir John discovered wedged inside the wall cavity of the building he demolished to build the Bank of England – is out of commission today. Instead, we head upstairs, through corridors that Sir John apparently colour-matched to a chip of red paint he’d brought back from a Pompeii villa, to the Breakfast Room, featuring one of his trademark pendentives: a dome with pointed corners that allows it to sit on a square base.

Josh is thinking about Charles again. “The thing that unlocked everything was I discovered a line that Peter (Morgan, who created ‘The Crown’) had written where he likens Charles to someone waiting to be drafted to go to war, and I love the idea that Charles’s predicament is essentially that, until his own mother dies, he cannot live a life of any meaning. I loved that, immediately, and it’s written all over my scrapbook. That, and the sense that he always wants a hug from his mum.”

It’s clear from his interactions with the wardens at the Sir John Soane’s Museum that Josh is a familiar presence here. I’m not entirely sure he’s joking when he tells me he’s considering wearing a tie from its gift shop at his next awards ceremony. Certainly, he has enquired whether the place can be hired out for birthday parties, and the answer was affirmative, he tells me, with some excitement.

“I’m a sucker for museums,” says Josh as we leave. “Ultimately, I think I’m a frustrated interior designer, unashamedly interested in architecture and buildings and properties, but I’m also desperate to move back to the country one day. Whenever I go to Francis’s I’m just, like, ‘I don’t want to leave.’”

Right now, Josh is heading to north London, where he’s just bought his first home (he’s moving there with his girlfriend). Before flagging down a black cab, he shows me some photos of the new place on Rightmove. He’s especially pleased with an airy room that has a beautiful white mezzanine given over entirely to bookshelves.